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Plants Communicate Using Fungi
Shipud writes "In response to aphid attacks, some plants produce chemicals that repel the aphids and attract wasps, the aphids' natural enemies. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen have shown that plants attacked by aphids can communicate that information to neighboring plants via existing networks of fungi in the soil. Thus fungal symbiosis with plants is shown to be taken one step further: not only do they provide nutrients to plants, they also function as communication hardware."
The vegetarians will be slaughtered for their terrible crimes aginst plantkind.
Anybody else overcome by Alpha Centauri nostaliga at the notion of large, initially hidden, fungus-based communications networks?
Also, given that we've discovered several enormous fungi (I think the largest known spreads across some 2,200 acres), I wonder if this sort of thing is actually much more common than we currently know. Ping would probably suck; but there is a lot of (fungal) fiber in the ground.
Old news
Neat... ...would be terrible if this fungi network were to cross colonize with the fungus that makes zombie ants...
Cheers!
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
It's amazing to investigate fungi. In all of our space search for intelligent life, we stand on top of a living world that's far more complex than we can imagine. When we beings were evolving from very simple biology, at some point we split, and in one direction eventually became plants, and the other eventually became animals. After that split, there was another split. On that split, one direction eventually became animals, and the other direction eventually became fungi. In each split, as it were, there was a fundamental difference; each time a split occurs, one can associate one side with being more or less complex than the other side. Looking at this as one would look at a tree in nature, one can assume that each split can be represented as a node point, and at each node point, there is a stem, and a main branch that continues. Each stem represents less complexity. In our case, as humans, we split before the fungi did, so they're more advanced than humans are.
I once asked my daughter about a Venus FlyTrap, as it ate a frog. I asked, "How does the plant know to close like that, and eat the thing inside? We have brains, but how does the plant do it? Where's the plant's brain?" Her answer, "The roots are the brain". She's 6.
Sorry, couldn't help it... :)
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
fungi in the soil > facebook
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Because no matter how far-fetched and imaginative there is something in the natural world even weirder and more complex. Right now I am getting into invasive species and grasses. Good times.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Their concerns, senses and physical manipulations would be exclusively chemical and at micro-scales. Their processing speed would be slow, but fast enough for them. A sense of self awareness may, or may not be useful to them.
Fungi have been around a lot longer than us. A certain kind of intelligence might be useful to it. The only way we'd be able to tell would be to measure discrete chemical interactions between them and run a zipfs distribution analysis on the result (http://language.worldofcomputing.net/nlp-overview/zipfs-law.html).
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
How long before some geeky boffin demonstrates that you can use this for computations?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Watch Dr. David Suzuki's "The Nature Of Things" episode called "Smarty Plants: Uncovering the Secret World of Plant Behaviour":
http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/smarty-plants-uncovering-the-secret-world-of-plant-behaviour.html
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
And play the plants screaming at harvest time for all the vegetarians. How's that broccoli taste NOW?!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...with luminescent mushrooms used for terminal output...
An example of fungus communication.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
When laypeople read these stories of interspecies cooperation, they might think: How do they know to do that? This leads to thoughts of intelligent design in a lot of readers. They need to be reminded from time to time that system A did one thing and system B did another. Under environmental conditions, system A's arrangment - arrived at at random - led to survival and B's did not. System A didn't sit around designing a better system.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
It's not communication between plants via fungus, it's command and control of plants by fungus.
It took a real world war to end the airplane's patent wars. - Fâché Rouge -
There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas.
Have gnu, will travel.
I thought this was brilliant.
When Paul Stamets has called the network of mycelium in the soil "nature's internet" of course everybody thought that he had eaten a little too much of a certain kind of mushroom. Turns out he had eaten just enough.
It's an interesting talk even if you don't buy into his more extreme ideas.
Interesting enough I printed it to PDF for later perusal
My only complaint is that I am skeptical a planet sized brain would be that aggressive. I'd rather think it would consider humans part of its own 'biology' in much the same way that we consider mitochondria and e. coli part of our biology.
We have no problem wiping out e. coli when it gets out of line but we would never eradicate it completely.